Still recovering from seeing Gomorrah Sunday.
You follow five different sets of characters through a few days. You aren’t given any explanations—just fall into their world.
On one hand, their world is extremely violent. A war has broken out between factions, and heads get blown off right and left. The movie shoves it in your face. The violence is never heroic or aestheticized. I don’t know if there is a right way to present violence, but Gomorrah succeeds in presenting it so that it does not seem glamorous, exciting or fun. It is always sordid and pointless. And there is always space for reflection on the consequences, the harm that will reverberate.
The style is aggressive and leaves you feeling beaten up. The camera shoves you into the faces of the characters. We are compelled to scrutinize their eyes and their pores, while the world outside and around them is a blur. It’s dizzying and claustrophobic. Only when there is a vista too grim to miss does the camera pause to take in a landscape.
On the other hand, even more disturbing is the culture the movie presents, in which insanity is accepted as normal.
All the usual junk associated with gangster movies is avoided. Police, the law, only exist on the fringe. There is a rivalry between two factions that destroys many lives, but what’s at issue is never mentioned. The war is simply a fact and everyone has to take sides. In one scene young Totò hesitates a moment before agreeing to help his criminal mentors kill a neighbor—and we watch as a last glimmer of decency is extinguished and he accepts his fate as servant to psychotic cretins.
The characters and stories keep intersecting at Francesco di Salvo’s megastructure housing block in the Scampia area outside Naples. Apparently no one has lived in it for years, and no wonder. The characters inhabit it like Lombard refugees camping out in a ruined Roman bath. Welcome to the new Dark Age.
We are taken on a relentless descent into an abysmally dark world, where everyone is destroying or destroyed. No one in the movie ever talks about crime or the Camorra or the System because to complain would be to imagine there is some alternative, and that is impossible.
At one point, Marco & Ciro, two teenage idiots, have robbed a drug dealer and celebrate at a beach joint. Marco is so high on the drugs and the thrill of actually having accomplished something that he does a silly dance, singing along with the jukebox to his friend. It’s the one and only moment of happiness and affection in the whole movie. And the point of it is to make what happens to them in the end even worse.
It’s revealing that the director Matteo Garrone said in an interview that he thought of Gomorrah as less a gangster movie than a war movie, and cited Paisà as a model, with its separate stories and matter-of-fact brutality. But Paisà managed to be devastating without being totally without hope. Nothing like hope is on offer here. A sermon, a polemic, a rant but no consolation.
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